I attended the "How the Buddha Met His Mother": Book Talk by Donald Lopez at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art. I am listing some interesting insights from the author here. My takes on them are written in italic. Please note that I am not an expert on the matter beyond having taken a class in Buddhism up to the middle school examination.
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The mother component of the Buddha's five considerations before being includes a woman whose natural life span is only pregnancy period + 7 days. We didn't pay attention to this factor when we learnt Buddhism in middle school. That is probably because it would have been a traumatizing detail for the kids.
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Most of the Suttas don't have much information about the first 29 years of Buddha's life. That information comes in Dhammapada Commentary written in 5th century AD.
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The story goes as the Buddha went to heaven and preached Abhidhamma to his mother (who was born in heaven). This story claims that Abhidhamma was put together by Buddha during his lifetime. However, the generally accepted idea is that Abhidhamma was developed centuries after Buddha's death. Also, this claim about preaching Abhidhamma comes from Dhammapada Commentary (written later).
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Karl Eugen Neumann has put forward a claim as to nuns (female monks in Buddhism) having not existed during the Buddha's lifetime. His claim is that the stories about the order of nuns were added later to the pali texts. I looked this up. These claims are not generally accepted by the scholars.
[Loosely related]: The middle school education (up to GCE Ordinary Level examination) in Sri Lanka requires students to take 6 core subjects and 3 optional subjects. The core subjects include history and religion. However, you take one religion of choosing [ (a) Most of the time -- this is the religion students practice. (b) In few occasions -- this is the religion student's grew up in even though they don't practice it anymore. (c) Very rarely -- this can also be a religion for which the school has a teacher while the student might be practising a whole different religion. Most of my knowledge on Buddhism comes from (b) ]. I am quite happy about the history class because it broadly covered Sri Lankan as well as world history. The Buddhism class gave a good overview. However, one could hope for a religion class in which we learn about multiple religions, along with the pros and cons of individual religions as well as the religion in general.